Hey-ho, squiders! This is the start of a maybe-ongoing series. The saying goes that the book is better than the movie, but have you ever come across a story where the opposite is true? Where you liked the movie (or TV show) better than the book?
I’m sure this is all subjective, so feel free to argue with me if you want!
I read a lot of Michael Crichton when I was a teenager. Sphere, Congo, Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Lost World. Big fan.
But I love Jurassic Park the movie more than I liked the book. (The Lost World movie is a mess.)
Part of this might be because I read the book after I saw the movie.
I was 10 when the movie came out, and it was the first PG-13 movie I ever saw. And, squiders, I loved it. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it, honestly. I am anxiously awaiting the time when the small, mobile ones will be old enough to watch it with me. (The bigger, mobile one is older than I am when I saw it, but he doesn’t want to. In retrospect I think it’s because when he was 2 we went to a museum with a full-sized animatronic t-rex and that was a bit traumatic.)
(The T-Rex was a surprise for us all.)
I think I may have searched out Michael Crichton’s books after the movie, so it was a while before I got to reading Jurassic Park the book.
Often the complaints about books made into movies is the amount of things that are left out–side plots, characters, entire plot points, etc., because in almost all cases it’s impossible to adapt everything from a book into a 2- or 3-hour movie. In many cases I’ve also found that characters’ personalities are changed as well, which tends to really bother me.
All those things are true here. There’s characters in the book that don’t carry over to the movie, and the ones that do are different, sometimes in arbitrary ways. Different people get eaten by dinosaurs. John Hammond’s vision is completely different, and there’s the danger of the dinosaurs escaping the island. By all rights, I should have been annoyed by the discrepancy.
(That being said, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to be more tolerant of changes in story between different mediums. A story can’t–and shouldn’t–be the same in different formats, but needs to be adapted to work in that particular form. For example, I’ve read Pillars of the Earth, watched the miniseries, and played the video game. All of them are different, but still good in their own form. And I once took a class on Coursera where each week we’d watch part of Fellowship of the Ring, read the same section in the book, and play that area in Lord of the Rings: Online. It’s actually quite fascinating.)
(Arguably where the issues arrive is when changes are made that change the core story.)
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I do truly believe that whatever form you’re first exposed to for a story (assuming you liked it) tends to be your “base” for that story. I saw the movie first, so I like it better. Maybe if I had read the book first, I’d be chalking Jurassic Park up as another example of the book being better than the movie.
(Some stories, however, seem to work great in a number of forms with a number of changes. I don’t know how many variations on the Wizard of Oz I’ve consumed over the years, but I pretty much like all of them.)
(I don’t make the rules.)
What do you think, squiders? Thoughts on Jurassic Park specifically? Thoughts on whether seeing a movie first changes your perception?
